FRANKIE'S PLACE

Journalist Jim Sterba grew up fatherless on a farm in Michigan. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Frances "Frankie" Fitzgerald enjoyed a privileged childhood. Despite their dissimilar backgrounds, they fall in love, marry, and move into Frankie’s place, an idyllic, isolated cabin on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Narrator Christopher Lane does an admirable job relating Sterba’s morning jogs, the couple’s icy dips in Somes Sound, and the exhausting hikes Sterba fondly refers to as "Frankie’s Survival School." From the “proper” way to eat lobster to Sterba’s war with mice in the cottage (he consults Sun Tzu’s THE ART OF WAR), Lane keeps the tone appealing. This is a love story with recipes celebrating the delectable dishes life offers--culinary and otherwise--if we’re conscious enough to notice. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine [Published: JUN/ JUL 04]